The New Year coundown is ON!!! How are you feeling about your success in 2013? Just recently, I sat in a 2014 goal planning group with a small group of women, and we discussed what are goals were and what successes we had this year. I was so excited to share because I’d had so many successes this year (will have to outline in another post) simply because I actually had a plan in place. I had a clear plan in place, and I didn’t allow a lot of obstacles to get in the way of getting the the end goal.
When you’re clear about your goals, and continue to plant your seeds to reach your goal regardless of the obstacles, you will get there. You have to just keep going. Keep pushing. Keep believing.
Here are 5 steps to success that were critical to how I stepped my game up in 2013, and how it will be amplified in 2014.
1. Write down your goal(s).
“If you have a goal, write it down. If you do not write it down, you do not have a goal – you have a wish.” ~Steve Maraboli
See, it’s not enough to just set a goal…in your head. Write the vision, make it plain. It really is as simple as that. Be clear about what you want and write your goals down. It’s not enough to say you want a new house in 2014.
What kind of house do you want? How many bedrooms? Location? Cost? When do you want to move into your new house by? How much money do you need to save to put down as a down payment? Clarity is king and key to achieving and reaching any goal.
2. Create your roadmap.
“Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible for your life” ~Les Brown
What’s your plan to get to your goal? If your goal is to run a half marathon for the first time, and you’ve never even ran a 5K then you’ve got your work cut out for you. It’s definitely not impossible to do, but you have to pace yourself and set out a map to reach your goal of 13.1 miles. Did you know that in order to train for a half marathon, you should be regularly running 10-15 miles per week? Right.
By breaking your goal into smaller pieces (your road map), it creates the realistic possibility that you are capable of achieving.
3. Take Action.
When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps. ~Confucious
This quote pretty much sums it up. You can have the best goals, with the clearest road map for how you’re going to reach your goals. But if they are just written down on a piece of paper without any action taken on them, you can forget about it! Regardless of what you hear, or how easy some people claim success to be, you can’t achieve anything without taking action. You must do the work.
4. Consistent Persistence.
“Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out” ~Robert Collier
So you’ve gotten clear on your goals, you created your road map that any GPS could follow and you’ve taken action to get to your destination. But it doesn’t happen the first, second or fifth time. You can either give up now, or keep going until you reach your end goal. For me, I intend to keep going.
Sir James Dyson went through 5,126 failed prototypes and his savings over 15 years. But the 5,127th prototype worked and now the Dyson brand is the best-selling vacuum cleaner in the United States (we own one and haven’t had to replace it in six years). If this isn’t consistent persistence, I don’t know what is.
5. Celebrate.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” ~Mark Twain
It’s so important to take time to celebrate each milestone in your journey of setting and achieving your goals. Even if you don’t get to your final goal by your deadline: always focus on how far you’ve come or how much you’ve achieved, and not how much you still have to do, or how far you have yet to go. Celebrate the little things which will encourage determination to achieve the bigger things.
BONUS #6. Get an accountability partner.
This should be someone who will get on your case when you don’t follow through with your action steps, but will also be there to cheer you on when you do. No one gets to the top of the ladder without someone there to hold it up for them.
What are some things you’ve found helpful in achieving your annual goals?
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Moms 'N Charge Motivational Monday: Push Through The Dirt #ActLikeASuccess - Moms 'N Charge
March 16, 2015 at 3:05 AM[…] planted anything, then it’s not your season to harvest.” How much time have you spent planting seeds? He talked about how he’s been planting seeds for a very long time, and the success (harvest) […]